Poor project management can be tracked to the insufficient planning and documentation. The lack of understanding of the information can lead to unrealistic expectations and poor allocation of resources such as budget and staff. This can lead to poor outcome and deliverables. Moreover, there is also a tendency that the project will suffer from a lot of risks.
Effective project management is all about getting the right information and analyzing them. One of the tools in project management is documentation review. This is a technique that is used to effectively identify risks within the project life cycle.
Documentation reviews are structured reviews of the project’s documentations. These include previous project files, plans, assumptions, contractual agreements and basically all other types of information need in project planning, particularly in risk analysis. In documentation reviews, it is crucial to know about the quality and consistency of the information because they may be signs of risks present on the project.
The significant part of documentation reviews is to gather important information about the project. But what are the types of information that you need to get for effective risk analysis? You need to get the nature of the project to understand what the project is all about is important. It is also important to review the objectives of the project, the quality control procedures, and the production schedule.
Getting other pertinent information such as online repository, native files in-house, and hardcopy paper are also necessary. When doing documentation reviews, it is important to look into all types of documents that are related to the project. This means that you need to look into either electronic or hard copy of the documents. Even looking at the e-mail documents is very important in this procedure.
This term is defined in the 5th edition of the PMBOK.